Nintendo games are too expensive, but everyone keeps buying them

When The legend of the zelda sword to the sky Released for the Nintendo Wii in 2011, the motion-controlled adventure was priced at $ 49.99. This week, Nintendo announced a remastered version of the game for Switch: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD, priced at $ 59.99, adding a dollar to the price for each passing year. since the launch of the original game.

Nintendo fans everywhere let out a silent sigh of resignation. Skyward Sword, a ten-year-old Wii game, is more expensive than it was when it first came out a decade ago, and it will continue to be expensive, because proprietary Nintendo Switch games are rarely discounted. Years after launch, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, a port of a Nintendo Wii U game that was released in 2017, it is still sold at full price almost four years later. Super Mario Odyssey does too, as well as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Party and New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe.

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Everyone does not like this. In fact, it feels bad. Nintendo’s competitors, like Sony, routinely and permanently lower prices for big-budget AAA games. God of War for PS4 launched in April 2018 for $ 59.99, but in October the price was permanently reduced to just $ 39.99. Today it costs less than $ 20. Marvel’s Spider-Man was released that same year and received a similar price drop of $ 20 in February 2019. Xbox, PlayStation and PC game releases often experience large price drops during the first year, or shortly after. It feels like an industry standard practice. As buyers, we’ve come to expect it, and that expectation makes Nintendo’s consistently high prices feel jarring. Like Nintendo is being unfair.

But Nintendo is not being unfair. They’re just following our lead, because as much as we’d like to pay less for the Nintendo Switch versions of reissued Wii U games, we don’t. We pay full price and continue to pay full price, regardless of how old the games are.

As usual, math and economics screw it up. According to Nintendo’s latest tax earnings report, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has sold more than 33 million copies since its launch, giving Nintendo a potentially staggering windfall. And the game is still a bestseller: it is still the fifth best-selling game on the Nintendo Switch eShop and to this day it is the ninth best-selling Nintendo Switch game on Amazon.

To put that in perspective, one of the best-selling PlayStation 4 games, God of War, had sold approximately 12 million copies in June 2019, and is currently the 23rd best-selling PS4 game on Amazon. PlayStation had to lower its price to keep buyers interested in Kratos; Meanwhile, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has sold in record numbers at full price since its launch.

Nintendo games are expensive. Everybody hates it. And yet Nintendo has no reason to lower prices: It is selling more copies of its games than its competitors, and it is making more money with each copy sold.

And, for better or for worse, Nintendo fans have gotten used to expensive games. On social media we bitterly joke about the “Switch tax” that puts a high price on modern ports of older games. We often try to rationalize those higher prices; Sure, Doom (2016) and The Witcher III: Wild Hunt cost more on the Switch, but the developers had to rebuild and optimize those games to run on Nintendo’s lower-powered hardware. Sometimes we have to streamline more: Final Fantasy X / X-2 HD Remaster costs less than $ 30 on Steam and PS4. The price increase from $ 20 to $ 49.99 is the devil’s deal we make to play it on a portable platform.

Nintendo has cultivated the expectation of expensive games, and while we don’t like it, we’ve come to accept it. Consumers have spoken to their wallets, and Nintendo has heard us loud and clear: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is worth $ 59.99, despite being a version of a decade-old Wii game that originally sold for $ 10 less. .

It feels bad, like Nintendo is being unfair, but the data doesn’t lie. We will buy it anyway and once again Nintendo will print money.